my adventures in the kitchen (with a bit of life in general thrown in)

It was my boyfriend’s birthday on the 10th and I made this cheesecake for the occasion!

I ended up using a recipe from Home & Garden magazine’s website. I should probably briefly describe how I choose my recipes. I first look through my (admittedly, modest) collection of cookbooks and magazines. I then normally check Epicurious and a few of my other favourite food blogs, and if I still can’t find a suitable recipe, I turn to Google. This strategy sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t. I prefer websites with comments and user ratings (one of the reasons why I love Epicurious so much), and don’t tend to use ones that don’t have that feature. Long story short– I had never used a recipe from H&G before, but decided to go for it because after doing comparative research, this is the recipe I liked best. I chose this one because of its low sugar content. Other recipes I found (ex. from Nigella, etc.) had 250g of sugar or MORE. With peanut butter AND chocolate, that is an incredible amount of sugar and not something we need (side note: I am really trying to limit the amount of sugar I eat, or at least be more aware of it).

Overall, this recipe was a “hit” — most importantly, the birthday boy liked it!! I knew it would be rich — given that it contains PB, chocolate, and cream cheese — but I underestimated just HOW rich. I could only eat a very small amount at a time, and we froze half of it.

As you can see from the pictures, the crust didn’t turn out perfectly, something that’s happened every time I’ve made cheesecake in Germany. I think it is the cookies. I used Leibniz Vollkorn biscuits, which is about the closest thing you can find to Graham crackers. Nevertheless, something is not quite right about them (although they do taste good), and the crust doesn’t set properly. It could be that the butter/biscuit ratio doesn’t work with these biscuits. Also, the pan (form) I used is not perfect either, which could contribute to the problem as well.

Cheesecake pre-oven. The H didn't make it through the cooking process!Finished cake, side viewFinished cake, front view